Clean Up Tips To Get Your Home Ready For Sale

The Selling-Your-Home Garage Sale
In preparation to sell your home, there is a lot to clean, repair, and de-clutter. For the weeks that your home is on the market, you are going to be living in a stripped-down version of your home, one with minimal furniture, appliances, and decoration. In an effort to remove some of the clutter from the home, many homeowners decide to turn that clutter into cash with a time-honored garage sale.

There’s More Stuff Than You Think
No matter how tidy and economical you think that you are, you probably have more stuff than you know. Kitchen appliances, extra serving dishes, old yard tools, books, and children’s toys have a way of accumulating. You will also be surprised how much storage space you had in your home. Pulling out all the clutter will force you to inspect those hard-to-reach cabinets, that extra crawlspace, and the corners of the basement. All of these places will need to be cleaner, and later, inspected. Better to spend time with them now.

How to Choose
For some people, going through old clutter can be an emotional experience, and each item stumbled upon can cause memories to come up. When picking items for a garage sale, you want to be as detached as possible, as you try to get rid of more than you keep.

Many use the method of asking themselves, “Have I used this in the last year? Will I use it again?” Another way to think of it: “Will this just end up in the corner of a storage space in my new home? Am I willing to pack this in a box, carry it, and unpack it again? Is this object carrying me, or am I carrying it?” Asking yourself these questions will cause you to get rid of more than you keep.

The Kids’ Stuff
Kids are collectors by nature, and often enough, children’s toys are designed this way on purpose. So your kids are probably going to want to keep complete sets of whatever they have been collecting. When moving, children will also experience a level of nostalgia for the first time, and this will make it hard for them to part with things. See if they are willing to remove redundancies in their collections, perhaps choosing one set of toys over another, or, choosing a single one to represent the whole. Sometimes it comes down to bribery: it may not hurt to tell them about the new toys they will be able to buy with the cash from the garage sale.

Know Your Market
This is good advice for any money-making venture. Like the selling of the home itself, when it comes to the garage sale, you should go online to learn about the garage sale market. Craigslist and other online sites are a good way to figure out how to price your items.

Don’t use the amount you paid for an appliance to sell it, as you need to be competitive with other garage sellers, and there are some real pros out there. You will also need to find out if there are any local ordinances or Homeowner Association rules about yard sales. Do your homework; this will be good practice for when you sell your home.

One-Day Only
Garage Sales tend to do better early in the month, and it’s best to avoid holidays or local graduations. Plan the sale to be a single day; because the best stuff tends to get sold right away, garage sale hunters tend to distrust the two-day garage sale. If you have to, you can have another one-day sale later in the month.

Fridays and Saturdays are best, as is beginning the sale early in the day; most serious garage sale shoppers are out at 8 a.m. Begin your advertising campaign one week before the sale, and use both online and physical signs. On the day-of, put out the physical signs again. During the yard sale: make sure you mention to as many people as possible that you’re planning on selling your home. You can get the word of mouth about the sale of your home started early. A garage sale can be advertising for the sale of your home that pays for itself!

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